The Waiting Game

TL;DR

I hate waiting for video games to load. Now I hate waiting for video games to load a little less. Why? I did some “science” to figure how just how long it takes for me to go from the point of clicking the button to select “Play” to where I’m actually playing the game. As it turns out, I just need to relax a little because I’m not actually spending a lot of time waiting for video games to load. I present the “Time To Play” numbers for 40 out of the 117 games I own on XBOX 360.

Time To Play (TTP)

The experimental “setup” was as follows:

Insert game disc into XBOX 360

Start the stopwatch on my phone when I click the “Play” square in the XBOX dashboard

Try to click through the loading screens and menus as quick as possible to get to a single-player (SP) or multi-player (MP) game

Stop the stopwatch on my phone at the point where the SP or MP game was loaded and I was playing

Notes:

I do not have any games loaded onto my hard drive

I was connected to XBOX Live the entire time

If there was a title update for the game, I restarted from Step 1

If I didn’t have a TTP number for SP or MP, it’s because I typically don’t play the game in that mode or that mode is not offered in the particular title

TTP numbers are in minutes and seconds

These are the “Time To Play” numbers for 40 out of the 117 XBOX 360 games that I own.

As it turns out, I’m only spending a little over a minute from the time I want to play a game to the time I am actually playing that game. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had the best TTP for both SP and MP games clocking in at just under a minute. I’m honestly not sure what was going on with Halo: Reach SP loading as it had the slowest TTP of 3:31.2.

I’m still going to be clicking through the menus to play games as quick as possible, save for that first time through where I don’t have a save game, but I’ll be doing so with a more tempered head.

The Real Travesty

Psychonauts was an “Unrecognized Disc”. I died a little inside. I think it might be due to the fact that Microsoft sent me a new XBOX 360 after my freezing issues with Halo: Reach and the latest drive doesn’t recognize the original XBOX discs.

Thanks for reading. You can find more hilarity over on my Twitter account, @CzarneckiD.